Hi all,
Sometime tonight, I'm going to merge the dports "staged" branch with
master. It's not as good a qualify as previous merges because neither
gnustep nor libreoffice built, despite the latter having no changes.
The FreeBSD ports collection has (without explicitly stating it) made a
policy that the minimum GCC supported is now gcc 4.6. I've recently had
to put in a bunch of patches just to keep gcc 4.4 running as before, but
that puts us on the path for divergence.
Furthermore, anything built with clang is incompatible with libraries
built with gcc 4.7. That's because clang is using libstdc++ from gcc
4.4 because it was built with 4.4 That's why gnustep is currently broken.
So it's time to switch the compiler used for DPorts. After the next
merge, I'll put that into work and it should be well in place for the
3.6 release.
That gives gcc-4.4 little purpose to exist. Furthermore the FreeBSD
Ports collection is being made clang-friendly at a furious rate to
prepare for FreeBSD 10. It's been recommended that we actually skip gcc
4.7 and go straight to Clang as the ports compiler. That's not
practical, but it does give a big argument for replacing the gcc-4.4
base compiler with the latest release of clang after say DragonFly 3.7
branch is created.
There will be some breakage by moving to gcc 4.7 but it won't be on any
important ports I would guess (if it is, I'll patch those and put the
fixes straight into FreeBSD ports).
--John